The Fourth of the Fourth | Blogging Birthday 2017

On this day in 2005 I started blogging, 12 years later and I’ve written 1874 posts. I’ve actually written more posts than that, but some of them never see the delights of publication, I have certain standards.

Most popular blogging sites focus on a particular subject or agenda, I don’t. For me, blogging has, always been about expressing myself and not about driving a particular set of topics. Sometimes I dive into series, sometimes I just write what I want to write in a single article.

I’d like to say thank you to those of you who read and those who comment, it’s humbling to recognise that you invest your time reading what I write.

When I started blogging I used TypePad which I quite liked, but had some limitations so eventually switched to a self hosted WordPress.org site. Running your own WordPress installation comes with some overhead, particularly if you want to keep your site out of the hands of hackers.

More recently I’ve migrated over to WordPress.com which is the WordPress application hosted by WordPress.

There were a couple of glitches in the migration, but all of my information made it across without any problems. The only lingering issue is that some of my older posts are missing their header image which is a problem I can live with.

There were several reasons for switching over to WordPress.com:

I wanted to move to HTTPS as the primary protocol. Google and other search sites give preference to HTTPS and it was going to be tricky (and expensive) to go HTTPS with my existing hosting provider.

I’d learnt what I wanted to learn about hosting WordPress which I’ve used on a number of private projects.

Maintaining WordPress does require some effort, it’s a lot better than it used to be, but it was still more effort than I was wanting to expend.

I wanted to save some money. My existing hosting was coming up for renewal which gave me the impetus to change and using WordPress.com was cheaper than the hosting provider I was using.

It’s good to change.

I’ll be back soon with some more writing, but until then I’ll leave you with a thought from someone else: